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Monday, 3 June 2013

Legends Archangel

So this is the spoils of my might Toys R Wot?? Adventure. Ever since I saw him in the comic, I have had a soft spot for Archangel. This can definitely be attributed to his sweet ass wings. Man I always wanted some of my own. They look so cool. I think ages ago I picked up a little toy of Archangel, it had firing missile things on his wings, but they just didn’t have that “Wow” factor that Archangel’s wings need. I have since lost/gave away that little fella and have been waiting for an appropriately wowsome figure since.

I knew of a few of the old Marvel Legends made by Toy Biz all those years ago and liked quite a few of them. thinking back I should have picked some up, after all they were only $15 and that was when the Australian dollar was a lot weaker, so they were pretty good value for money, but I was getting out of general characters and focussing on Transformers.

On my recent travels for Masterpiece Transformers, I discovered this nice version of Warren in the Legends line, which has been taken over by Hasbro. It’s nice to finally see larger figures back, but sadly the price has jumped up to $30. Still I guess they are better value than the $18 4 inch figures we get. Is he worth it?

HELL YEAH!

I love this figure.

Not a bad little package, it is larger than the other characters in this wave. Due to the awesome WINGS plopped behind him. I love they way they promote the Build Figure “Hit-Monkey” thing, yet old Warren Worthington here doesn’t come with any Hit-Monkey parts. Hit-Monkey, sheesh, I didn’t know who he was and some googling did inform me, but I didn’t really care in the end, so no great loss. Unlike the previous Build-a-figures, Hit monkey is a small character. Others have been the Sentinel robot, Apocalypse and some others. I’d like those two, but you have to buy all figures in the wave to get the parts. Too much hassle.

Back to Archy though, the artwork looks very nice and I love the way his name piece has been placed and printed. It’s got a great cartoony font and the printing dots that comics had when I was a kid and technology was different.

Understandably his wings aren’t attached. I thought they could have gotten away with wrapping his wings around him, but they add quite a bit of height, so he would have been as tall as the card back, plus it would have covered up his sparkly lines. I think they did a good job with the character presentation. You can see the wings well enough, get a good view of the figure, so the impression is made. You immediately understand that Archangel is a dude with big metal wings!

On the back is a relatively unobstructed view of the art, with a short bio. A rather awkward sounding bio if you ask me. It is multilingual too, which I kind of hate, as it limits space and usually makes the text a rather boring (and easily translated) piece.

Wow, you know after looking at the toy first and now working through the box like this, I thought the toy’s chin looked a bit large and squarer than it should be for the character, but the head sculpt is actually a really well done one, modelled on this artwork. I am impressed!

Now a closer look at the toy in package. I will be brief.

Wings take up most of the space.

Pry the bubble from the card and you get this. You can see why he is separate to the wings, they are as big as the figure!

That is GREAT!

The wings just have a peg that goes into a hole in his back. Which ends up being a surprising solid connection.

Oooh! you can also see sculpted layers of feathers. If my memory serves me correctly, at the start, Archangel had about six wings if varying sizes, I think this might be referencing that, or perhaps just multiple layers of ‘feathers.’

They have a couple of hinges on there that allow for quite a good range of movement from the connector. I am glad they didn’t go the easy way and just use ball joints as they probably wouldn’t have been strong enough.

But before we connect, the figure.

(it smelt a bit like crayons)

The colours are really nice and the sculpt is appropriately muscly, yet light looking.The wine red coloured highlights are gorgeously shiny. Not as pink as I remember it being in the comics, but that’s a good thing. It looks very nice. My mine issue (and this is only because it’s an action figure) is that the lines for articulation cut up the look so much. I am not too sure if it’s the sculpting, the colours or what, but the joints are incredibly obvious.

While I am on that, let’s go over his articulation. It’s GREAT! Double jointed knees (one of which needs to be straightened by the looks of things – It’s fine now though), elbows, thigh cut, abdominal crunch, wrist hinge/swivel, bicep cut, hinged hips and swivel waist. It seems his elbow and knees have a bit of ratcheting to them. I’d say it’s the cheap nubs the likes of which are on some Transformers knees that I am not fond of when you can see them. I think however his hips could have been better. You can swing them forwards/backwards and out to the side, but no rotation. This comes from the thigh cut, which when used looks quite ugly and, well, cut. If the hips were done a bit better that could have been avoided I think.

His head sculpt is really great and the way it’s been done with the neck allows for a head of movement, it does help that he doesn’t have any hair though.

He’s got that strong chin I mentioned before, crisply applied white for his eyes. Which looks great. Remember this is a man who thought he lost everything and (I think) willingly submitted himself to Apocalypse to get his ‘wings’ back. I see, in a very nice touch, they have lined his eyes with a bit of black. THAT is very nice indeed. He has managed to keep his blonde eyebrows as well.

If I wanted to get picky, his ears should be the lighter blue of his face and my particular one here has a bit of a broken sprue piece still attached to his head. Nothing a bit of TLC couldn’t handle.

One thing that really bothers me though are his hands
.
Really? Gun Hands??? Ok, one can be a generic holding grip, but the other has a defined trigger finger. A splayed hand would have been fine, hell, I would have been happy with a fist, but that is a definite gun-toting-hand.

Another odd thing, are his ankles, I am not too sure what type of joint is in there, a hinge can be seen, so he can point his toes up and down, but you can’t rotate the foot unless it goes on a funky angle. Perhaps a hinge connected to a ball joint, hindered by the boot sculpt? Shame, as a sideways rocking foot would have been the topping of the cake. It’s still a fairly adaptable joint though. Ok, enough about the ground based figure, lets slap those wings on this angel.

Now we’re talking, look at that. How cool does that look? Sure it isn’t as shiny as the comic represents, but it’s a pretty good metallic colour there. He has a huge wingspan and you can spy some ‘fin’ wings on his back too.

Oh and check this out, when he’s feeling all emo:
Oh yes! I am glad he rocked up in the 90s you know. If he showed up now, he’d be all dark hair, tattoos and boring.

Lets add some mood lighting shall we?

THAT’S more like it!

“Father? Is that you?”

Ha ha ha. Did I say I love this toy? Because I DO!

Back to the review. From the back, he is less well covered, much like someone wearing a hospital gown.

When unfurled, his wings have a surprising range of motion, only hindered by their own size. In a way this keeps them in a better position though, a more natural angle, nothing too steep or high can be achieved. The joints are nice and strong too. This can be achieved by manipulating the wings, not the backpack!

And now to open those suckers up!

It’s quite interesting, as his wings reach the ground, you can use them to stabilise him in some more precarious posing than you would be able to get away with normally. He is unsurprisingly a bit back heavy, but that can be overcome.

As you can see the joints work really well for pulling off flying poses and even from the top they look really cool! In fact, I bet he could cast a nicely terrorising shadow…

Run Stupid denizens of mangled LEGO town, the Angel of Death is above you!

Landing pose. The third one shows how much you can angle the wings again. Probably should have used a different pose for that…

That first image above is using the wings for support as only one foot is on the ground.

And now that he has landed again, more wing options…

I love the options that you have with his wings and his balance is good enough to do a crouch take-off stance too. The wings can also be ‘loosely’ posed around him as well if you like as well.

And now for a couple of random play shots.

What’s that? Oh, Nothing.. Nice and cosy in here!

So I ended up liking this guy more than I would, which is pretty good as I though I’d like him a lot! The wings are great and despite lacking a ball joint are more than adequate for what you need. In fact I think the right choice was made as they are heavy and a ball joint alone would have not been strong enough. A ratcheted joint would have been unsightly.

The colours are pretty good and the shiny red bits add some nice definition to his suit, as well as adding a bit of class by being a little bit chrome. In fact my only real complaint would have to be the gun hands. I think I read a review of this on amazon.com which stated that the main body is a re-used body from someone else, that’s all well and good, but they made a new head, surely they could give him some different hands.

However on the plus side, I do believe I have some weapons that will fit his scale quite nicely. A shotgun wielding Archangel could be flying over my collection soon!

On a slightly different note, it has (sadly) inspired me to get some more. I found Wolverine and some others online for their US prices and so got them. As well as a couple of nice items of an X-Men nature. Stay tuned.